Venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife, Ann Doerr, are giving Stanford University $1.1 billion to launch a new school focused on tackling challenges of climate change and sustainability issues.
The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability will launch this fall and be the university’s first new school in 70 years.
Mr. Doerr said in an...
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Venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife, Ann Doerr, are giving Stanford University $1.1 billion to launch a new school focused on tackling challenges of climate change and sustainability issues.
The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability will launch this fall and be the university’s first new school in 70 years.
Mr. Doerr said in an interview the donation was a family decision made with his wife and their daughters, Mary and Esther. “We talked about this at dinner and both Mary and Esther were wildly enthusiastic about it, and angry that we haven’t made more progress against the problem,” the legendary Silicon Valley investor said about the environmental challenges facing the planet.
The gift is the largest in the university’s history, and appears to be the second largest one-time gift ever made to a university, behind Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion gift to his alma mater Johns Hopkins University, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s list of donations.
Mr. Doerr, an engineer by profession and later, a venture capitalist and chairman of Kleiner Perkins, made his fortune as one of the first institutional investors in Google and Amazon , among other successful business ventures, during the dot-com era. The Doerrs are part of the Giving Pledge, founded by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett, which encourages the world’s richest individuals and couples to give more than half of their wealth to philanthropy or charitable causes, either during their lifetime or in their wills.
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“As parents, seeing what’s going on in California—we’ve got the fires—seeing floods in the Midwest, we’re seeing droughts in Africa, we just can’t sit back,” Ms. Doerr said Wednesday.
Mr. Doerr, who has long had a connection to Stanford, said he has been interested in the Palo Alto, Calif., university’s work on sustainability and climate change. He called to learn more about their efforts. “I was impressed by the urgency that they were bringing and the scale of their ambition,” he said.
Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne said the new school will have a three-part structure. It will include traditional academic departments such as natural sciences, engineering and social sciences, as well as building on their interdisciplinary institutes. “The third and most important part, in some ways, is the accelerator that we added to that structure to enable our faculty to go from idea to impact much more seamlessly, much more effectively, much more efficiently,” Mr. Tessier-Lavigne said.
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The accelerator will also support interdisciplinary policy design and engagement with governments and nonprofits.
“To address this massive global challenge of sustainability, you’ve got to start acting now,” said Arun Majumdar, inaugural dean of the Doerr School. “I think this time scale of what we need is being mapped into the organization structure.”
The school plans on having eight areas of scholarship that Stanford hopes to be the “most crucial for advancing long-term prosperity of the planet,” according to the school’s announcement. Those areas are: climate change, Earth and planetary sciences, energy technology, sustainable cities, the natural environment, food and water security, human society and behavior, and human health and the environment.
The academic departments will start with about 90 existing faculty from the university and add an additional 60 faculty over 10 years.
“We’re going to see the pace of innovation accelerate because the need is there,” Mr. Doerr said. “There’s no plan B. We’ve got to get this planet, this set of sustainability challenges, addressed in our lifetime.”
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Write to Talal Ansari at talal.ansari@wsj.com